One must understand that driverless vehicles will come sooner than one may think possibly by 2020-2022. Computers sitting in autonomous vehicles (AV) are essentially in the business of learning and improving on what a good human driver would do, writes Ajay Agraual in the new book, “Prediction Machine.” The more data they have, the better they become at predicting that the blur ahead is a pedestrian rather than sunlight reflecting off the road and reacting accordingly. The consequence is that the more miles under an AV test, the more unusual events (ie: a child biking on the road) the system faces and learns.

Such lessons once learned by computers are not forgotten and can be drawn upon by every vehicle using the same software.

AVs never fall asleep at the wheel or pull their eyes from the road to check their phone; this would make driverless cars much safer then human driven ones, which contribute to roughly 1.25 million road deaths each year worldwide. (The Economist, June 9th, 2018).

Google has tested driverless cars the longest through WAYMO which has reported in 2017 three collisions in 350,000 miles of driving in California while GM had 22 accidents in 132,000 miles. Neither was involved in a fatal accident such as TESLA (4 fatalities) and UBER (2 fatalities).

During this chaotic time mostly due to what is happening in the White House, one must remember History to be able to reject the newly announced Trump tariff on steel and aluminum.

On June 17th 1930, the Smoot-Hawley tariff was signed into law at the beginning of a recession triggered by the crash on Wall Street in October 1929. The act raised tariffs on over 20 000 imported goods; this bill was sponsored by Senator Reid Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley to supposedly bring back jobs to the U.S which was suffering already from a 10% unemployment rate.

The passage of the tariff law exacerbated the Great Depression. Soon after, Canada and most of the industrialized countries, raised their own tariffs in retaliation after the U.S bill had become law.

President Hoover at the time, contrary to Donald Trump who initiated the recent proposal, opposed the bill calling it “vicious, extortionate and obnoxious” because it would undermine international cooperation. President Hoover however, yielded to influence from his own Republican party and signed the bill.

Soon a tariff war engulfed the industrialized countries, international trade declined abruptly and by 1931* the Great Depression was on around the world.

THE CANOSSA PRECEDENT

Before Henry VIII’s (1491-1547) defiance of the Pope, there had been an incident between King and Pope that became well known in Europe: Heinrich IV, Emperor of Germany, met his match with Pope Gregory VIII in an incident later called The Canossa Submission.

The German king surrounded by vacillating princes decided in 1075 to name his own bishops rather than submit to the pope’s authority. In reaction, Pope Gregory VIII ruled in 1075: “We decree that no one of the clergy shall receive investiture with a bishopric or abbey or church from the hand of an emperor or king or any lay person…but if he shall presume to do so…he himself shall lie under excommunication.”

Should secular rulers have the power to appoint bishops of the church? The events at Canossa in 1077 reaffirmed the supremacy of the church over emperors and kings until the Reformation of the 16th Century led by Martin Luther.

Heinrich IV, king of Germany was determined to have his own way by investing his own bishops. The pope refused to give him his absolution unless he rescinded the nomination of his bishops. Insulted by the Pope’s arrogance, Heinrich sent the Pope the following letter: “…because of the confusion you have wrought…I Henry, King by the grace of God together with all our bishops, say to you: Descend! Descend!” (Heinrich letter to Gregory in 1076) i At the Council [Synod] of Worms in 1076 the Emperor and his bishops publicly called for Pope Gregory to be deposed from his office. Their attempt was unsuccessful: in retaliation, Gregory excommunicated Henry from the church and stripped him of his kingship. The emperor’s supporters quickly folded under the threat of excommunication.

When Heinrich realized he was totally isolated, he had no other choice but to humbly apologize to Gregory in order to regain his throne. So Heinrich came from Germany to the fortress of Canossa in northern Italy where the Pope was staying. “There on three successive days standing before the castle gate, laying aside all royal insignia, barefooted and in coarse attire, he ceased not with many tears to beseech the apostolic help and comfort…At last overcome by his persistent show of penitence, we released him from the bonds of anathema and received him into the grace of Holy Mother Church… (Pope Gregory VIII letter to the German Princes 1077, p.79) The events that occurred at Canossa showed that for the first time since Theodosius, the church was able to demonstrate that its authority extended as far as deposing emperors. This event was surely known to Henry VIII and his advisors in 1535.

EARLY ENGLAND

It is important to remember England’s early history. Christianity came early (circa 300 AD) to Britain, a Roman colony, as it did throughout the Roman Empire.

When William the Conqueror invaded the island from Normandy to land near Hasting he was only the second successful invader after Caesar in a thousand years… he would also be the last. Once William and his French Norman companions had vanquished King Harold at Hastings, William walked with his army to London where the authorities had already pledged their loyalty to him. William, a very proud Christian leader, found a well-organized church with bishops named by Rome and numerous churches and parishes already well established. There was an active communication between William and the Pope, asking for his blessing after his conquest of England. ii

The new regime took two generations to establish itself in the face of periodic revolts organized by the former Anglo-Saxon elite. At least two invasions from the Vikings of Denmark were repelled by the Norman English army and after William’s death, pacification continued with his sons and grandsons.

At his death, his wife Matilda continued the tradition of founding monasteries and convents to earn points in the afterlife as was the custom in Normandy and in France. So when a Norman potentate wanted to do a deed to save his soul, he would fund the building of a church or the creation of a new monastery including the recruiting of an abbot and the necessary monks. Pretty soon the English countryside was dotted with numerous monasteries, abbeys and priories just as in France and in Normandy. Of course all these Catholic institutions required a great deal of manpower, monks, nuns, priests and of course many bishops always named by the pope in Rome. Close to 10% of the population was engaged in church and monastery activities, which was a drain on the economy as this section of the population did not actively work in a productive fashion. In 1535 the Church owned one-third of all land and, to add salt to the wound, a sizable portion of church revenues went directly to Rome.

Population

England & Wales France

In 1500

2.1 million 15 to 18 million

In 1600

4.4 million 20 million

In 1700

5 million 21 million

Source: Tacitus.N.U.

How could a country with less than one fifth of France’s population come to dominate the world and create a global empire?

Our thesis is that Henry VIII’s sexual appetite

forced him to get rid of Rome and allowed him to follow policies that made England the most powerful nation on earth until the U.S. came along after 1914.

Early in his reign Henry was as intellectual as he was physical. He liked to participate in theological debate and often he would write notes on the margin of church sermons that he attended. After his marriage to Catherine of Aragon – more a political marriage than a love match – Henry, only seventeen, was eager for a male heir; he was disappointed by the birth of daughter Mary but kept hoping for a male heir.

SALIC LAW AND ENGLAND'S SUCCESSION

Here we must go back in time to explain why England allowed a Queen to rule although a King was preferred while France did not allow women to reign. This was the root cause of the 100 Years Wars which started around 1325. Philippe le Bel, King of France also known as Philippe

IV died without a male heir. At that point, Isabelle de France -who was married to Edward II the King of England - claimed the French throne for herself as daughter of King Philippe and granddaughter of Saint Louis, King of France. After numerous discussions between the French legal team and its counterpart in England, the English side was winning the legal debate which forced the French to find a way out of their dilemma. Nobody in France wanted a French Queen living in England and married to the English king. So some clever French jurists dusted off an old 5th Century Frankish rule, called the Salic Law, which prevented women from acceding to the French throne.iii

The English left the negotiations in a huff and England declared war. This cruel war, which lasted 125 years, decimated French nobility whose armored knights were defeated twice, 70 years apart, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and then at the final crushing defeat at Agincourt in 1415 celebrated by Shakespeare. It was long-bows against heavily armored French knights and the countless arrows launched by the English won the day both times while the huge French horses tumbled and collapsed in the mud of the battlefield rendering the armored knights defenseless.

Finally, inspired by the great heroine Joan of Arc, France expelled in 1453 all the English troops except those at Calais which stayed under English control until 1558.

This is why, starting with Edward III and continuing with Henry VIII, the English kings and queens always claimed France as their rightful heritage and this claim was upheld until 1802 when France became a republic.

So Henry VIII’s daughters could be queens, but it was preferable to have a male king.

ANNULMENT TO EXCOMMUNICATION

A few years after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in 1509 and the birth of the future Queen Mary, Henry’s roving eye found a young beauty in his court named Ann Boleyn. He wanted to marry her for love, but especially to have a son as his present wife was beyond childbearing age. He therefore asked Cardinal Wolsey to negotiate in Rome for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine.

In those days (1529) a request for an annulment from a very Catholic King of England should have been fairly simple, as the legal pretext was that Catherine had been his late brother’s wife, a state of affair banned by the bible (Leviticus 20, 20-21). For Henry’s marriage to Catherine an exemption had been granted by the previous Pope, Julius II, so an annulment by the new Pope Clement VII should have been fairly routine.

Catherine, however was very religious and despite living apart from Henry wanted none of it and pleaded with her nephew Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, to use his influence over Pope Clement VII to stop Henry from divorcing her.

Eventually, the king of Spain’s influence over the Pope forced the latter to reaffirm in 1534, the validity of the marriage between Catherine and Henry and therefore his refusal to grant an annulment.

A solution to the stand-off was found after six years of waiting for Henry. Catherine would retire willingly to a convent and “be dead to the world” which would allow the Pope to finally grant an annulment, but Catherine refused this last solution.

Henry’s efforts to convince the Pope came to an end. At this point Henry VIII was living openly with Ann Boleyn who was already pregnant, so he absolutely wanted to marry her. Otherwise, she would give birth to a bastard!

HENRY VIII, DESPOT

The refusal from Rome triggered a huge change in Henry's attitude. While remaining a Catholic, he decided to eliminate the pope as head of the Church of England; Parliament became involved and Henry VIII became both king and supreme head of the Church of England on January 15th 1535.

A last effort was attempted to mollify the pope and Ann Boleyn’s father Lord Pembroke was sent to Rome to plead for Henry. The proud Englishman must have remembered Canossa because he refused to kiss the Pope’s feet so “delicately offered to him”, but he must have rued the day when his daughter was later decapitated. There would be no Canossa and despite the papal excommunication, Henry VIII stood firm. He would be pope and king.

Of course this created turmoil among the more conservative segment of the population, including some well-known personalities like Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who, faithful to the Pope to the end, was beheaded in 1532 after his conviction for “perjured testimony”. A new doctrine was established: absolute loyalty to the King; if not it was treason including the grievous insult of disagreeing with his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to the young Ann Boleyn. So heads started to roll in the true sense of the word and the Tower of London was full of dissidents and conscientious objectors waiting for their sentencing which was most often the death penalty. These dissidents were called “Papists” a term of contempt that would endure for centuries.

Contrary to another absolute King, Louis XIV of France, a century later, Henry VIII always worked through Parliament and the House of Lords. He was a tyrant who went through the motions of proposing laws to the Commons and convincing the House of Lords of his point of view. “Henry VIII wanted a purified Catholic church, a national church under his sovereignty”.iv In truth he had blood-soaked hands when it came to two of his six wives or those ministers who disagreed with him. He was a true despot, ridding himself of unwanted wives and ministers in the most bloody and cruel fashion, but he set England free from the shackles of Rome. Since the signing in 1215 of the Magna Carta that imposed limits on the King’s power by law,

English kings could not punish a freeman except through the law of the land or common law.v So Henry VIII could not behead an English subject without due process, unlike French kings who could issue a “lettre de cachet” against a citizen who would not be seen again. “Unlike in England, the “lettre de cachet” was an expression of the exercise of justice that a French king reserved for himself independently of the law courts and their processes just as the king reserved the right to grant “lettres de graces” to persons who had been convicted by the courts.” vi Henry VIII was a true “Barbe bleue” as Charles Perrault of children tale fame would have said. But overall, compared to the number of people killed by Louis XIV’s wars and famine, Henry VIII was relatively spare in his executions. Approximately 330 persons were executed during the turmoil of 1530-1540.

Henry waged war twice against a Catholic Scotland because England had been attacked, and from his English base in Calais he also had a skirmish with François I of France which won him Boulogne.

SWEEPING CHANGES

A wind of change was blowing across the land and the old scholastic approach to obedience and piety was being replaced by the more humanistic approach taught by Erasmus the famous Dutch philosopher who had been invited to teach at Oxford. Moreover, the influence of Luther was starting to be felt across the religious establishment and soon there were debates about the dogma of transubstantiation and the virginity of Mary. The proliferation of monasteries harboring thousands of “idle” monks was also criticized. For Henry they were wasteful and an affront to the Crown.

In 1538, emboldened by having crushed a rebellion by monks in 1538, Henry and his chief advisor Thomas Cromwell (Oliver Cromwell’s father) decided to widen the policy of suppression.

In the first eight months of 1538, thirty-eight monasteries were appropriated by the Crown. Within three years, the monasteries, the friaries, the priories and the nunneries were gone. We estimate that close to 25,000 former clerics, nuns and monks had to find work and occupation in this strange new world.

It was argued that the dissolution of the monasteries was for the higher good of the nation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land; the dissolution was of immense benefit to the Crown and represented the largest transfer of land since the Norman Conquest. vii Free from Rome’s interference, England became the shopkeeper of Europe and her ships were everywhere. Production of pig iron and cloth went up by 30% between 1535 and 1540 and the population despite periodic bad harvests was relatively well fed in contrast to the rest of Europe. In the summer of 1537 more measures against the old superstition were taken: the cult statue of Our Lady of Worcester was stripped to reveal that it was a doll-like effigy of an earlier bishop. It was soon decreed that there must be no more “kissing or liking” of holy images.

After Henry's death in 1547, his son Edward VI (1537-1553), born from his marriage to Jane Seymour, was crowned (at the age of nine).

An Act of Parliament banned the old religious services' English replaced Latin in religious services and Mass was no longer performed. Lending strength and unity to the English Church, The Book of Common Prayer, still in use today, was introduced. In 1547, Archbishop Thomas Crammer rejected the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

All these changes represented the definitive rupture with medieval Catholicism. As a result, the new place of the English language which had displaced Latin in religious services encouraged the growth of literacy among the population. Between 1550 and 1570, eighty-nine school foundations were established thus fostering the advancement of education.

Any minister who refused to use the new book was deprived of his position and imprisoned for six months; on his third offense he could be consigned to life imprisonment.

In July 1549, riots broke out in Clyst Heat to protest the new measures; troops were sent to quell the revolt and a “Mass” priest was hanged from the steeple of the Church of St-Thomas wearing his liturgical vestments. In fact the denial of transubstantiation effectively destroyed Mass.viii Bishops were no longer to be seen as successors of the apostles but as government officials.

Edward VI became the first anointed English king to enjoy the title of supreme head of the English Church.

MARY I OF ENGLAND

"Bloody Mary"

Upon Edward VI's death at the age of sixteen, his council drew up a “Device for Succession” attempting to prevent the country from returning to Roman Catholicism. Edward had named his cousin, Lady Jane Grey as his heir and excluded his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. Jane Grey became Queen but was deposed within thirteen days, tried for treason and later beheaded. Eventually Mary {1516-1558} won the political contest and became Queen of England as Mary I.

So the traditional Catholic supporters got their Queen and soon a reversal of 40 years of reform was initiated by her. While her father Henry VIII had cut off heads, Mary used a different method. Close to 300 religious dissenters were burned at the stake including prominent bishops and officials. (Fortunately, for the sake of the country, she ruled as queen for only five years). For Mary, it was her duty to bring back the old faith!

“If they did not believe that Christ’s body and blood were physically as well as spiritually present in the bread and the wine they were condemned for heresy. Three months before her death, the Queen sent a letter of complaint to the sheriff of Hampshire; his offense was to cancel the burning of a man who had recanted at the first lick of the flame. It was thus that she earned the sobriquet of Bloody Mary.” ix

Two plots against Mary were discovered before they could hatch: so Elizabeth the future Queen came under suspicion and was imprisoned in the Tower of London by order of her sister Mary for two months. After a tense meeting between the two sisters, Elizabeth was freed but put under house arrest until Mary’s death.

But Mary went too far in her insistence on marrying Philip of Spain another ultra-Catholic; this made the English people uneasy as to the religious and political direction of England.

Englishmen especially did not want a Catholic Spanish King upon Mary’s death. Nevertheless, she married Philip of Spain, a political marriage that made her very unpopular in England. At her death in 1556, she was only 42 and childless; the English emitted a sigh of relief and prepared to acclaim the new Queen.

ELIZABETH - THE VIRGIN QUEEN

England was rid of “Bloody Mary” without violence, as she had died of natural cause. So her half-sister Elizabeth (1533-1603), daughter of Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn, became the new Queen. To celebrate her coming coronation, Elizabeth entered the Tower of London itself and she remarked that “some have fallen from princes of this land to be prisoners in this place, I am raised from being a prisoner in this place to be prince of this land”.

She was now the Virgin Queen and she proceeded to return the country to the religion of her father and of her half-brother Edward VI. Using the Parliament and the House of Lords she slowly eliminated the opposition to her policies without violence, unlike her sister Mary. She had appointed a majority of nobles and bureaucrats to her privy council even before her coronation and soon the clerics and the Catholics were gone. There were debates but no executions: “after one of this debate Elizabeth was obliged to imprison two catholic bishops in order to prevent them from excommunicating her in public.” x

During her reign, she insisted that peace was much more desirable than war and she managed to have a peace treaty with both catholic kingdom, Scotland and France. Elizabeth was a careful Queen who managed to steer clear of numerous continental wars and religious conflict in Europe; she also had a reputation to be as learned as any don from Oxford and could debate theology with any of them. In fact she knew seven languages including Latin and classical Greek and had no need for an interpreter when she met ambassadors and kings from foreign lands. It was a golden period for England culturally and economically; Shakespeare was composing his plays and British explorers were discovering new lands to add to the nascent empire.

Her greatest challenge came with the enmity of Philip II of Spain who took upon himself the task of eliminating Elizabeth from the face of the earth. The pope Gregory XIII had issued a bull against Elizabeth in 1570 by which he excommunicated her as a heretic. This meant that all Catholic kings had a duty to eliminate the Queen of England.

In a well-known saga, a huge Spanish fleet sailed to attack England in 1582 with 10,000 soldiers and 7,000 sailors; the Armada was trapped as much by the sea as by the English ships. At the end more than half of the Armada 180 ships were sunk and 9,000 soldiers and sailors were lost or killed. Not a single ship of the English naval force led by Sir Francis Drake was lost. This victory helped create the aura of the English naval force’s invincibility.

The Massacre of Saint Barthélémy

Earlier, a bloody tragedy happened in France, the Saint Barthélémy’s massacre of the Huguenots in 1572, believed to have been instigated by the very Catholic Catherine of Medici, the Queen Regent; mobs attacked and killed Protestants with impunity. Women and children were thrown from bridges; every Huguenot in France became a target. The slaughter spread through Paris and expanded outward to other urban centers. Estimates for the number of Huguenots killed across France could be as high as 30,000. This event did more than any other to discredit the Catholic cause in England especially after it was reported that bells rang in celebration of the Huguenot massacre in Rome, and that Pope Gregory XIII ordered a Te Deum while his cardinals walked from shrine to shrine in a grateful procession. “It was the worst of the Century’s religious massacre and it printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion”. xi

England became a very hostile place for Roman Catholics and priests were hounded close to extinction. The right of Catholics to co-exist legally in England, was finally granted only in 1829 by the Roman Catholic Relief Act.

LAST OF THE TUDORS

At the end of her reign, Elizabeth had to face a series of plot against her from no less than Mary Stuart Queen of Scots, her cousin and mother of the future King of both Scotland and England, James I. After the third plot had been discovered, Elizabeth’s patience ran out and she reluctantly had Mary Stuart executed in the Tower.

Elizabeth’s greatest regret as she aged was that she was barren without an heir to the throne . A series of suitors presented themselves - all to no avail: the last was the Duke of Alençon, 22 years her junior, who waited patiently in England for Elizabeth to make up her mind. She realized that she was open to ridicule and the negotiations were stopped.

Thus, ironically, upon her death in 1603, the son of Mary, Queen of Scotland, decapitated by Elizabeth’s order in 1587, became James I, King of England and Scotland.

The brilliant Tudor dynasty was ended.

By Pierre Arbour (March 2014)

END NOTES

Hanscom, Hellerman & Pasner Voices of the Past: Readings in Medieval and Early Modern History

David Howarth, 1066:The Year of the Conquest

Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337-1453

Peter Ackroyd, Tudors: The History of England from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I

Le Plan Nord was an economic development strategy launched by the Jean Charest government in May 2011. Proving to be the perfect time for this plan, as the economic cycle and demand from China had brought mineral prices especially iron ore to an all-time high of $153 a ton. Gold and silver were also selling at an all-time high, $1800 an ounce for gold and $49.00 an ounce for silver.

On April 21 2012 at the Palais des Congrès, Charest was scheduled to deliver a speech on the Plan Nord when he was interrupted by striking students demanding lower tuition fees in p[articular; the premier joked that these jobless protestors could get a job in northern Quebec to help develop its mineral riches . He was later slammed by the press and the opposition for his humor and ridiculed for his Plan Nord.

Soon after, on September 4th, 2012, Pauline Marois was elected premier of a minority government and the Plan Nord as envisioned by the Liberal government was shelved. On April 7th of 2014, Philippe Couillard led the Liberals back in power with a majority government. His government is attempting now, to revive the Plan Nord by having Investissement Quebec invest tax payers money in a gold mine and a phosphate mine now struggling due to a lack of funding.; fortunately at Stornoway in northern Quebec, a new diamond mine is entering production and the price of diamonds have held up since 2011.

Meanwhile let us look at mineral prices:

MetalNovember 2015May 2011Amount

Iron ORE$57$153A ton

Gold$1068$1850An ounce

Silver$14.16$49.00An ounce

Nickel$5.80$9.00A pound

The Plan Nord is in agony and unfortunately the Quebec government will have a temptation to become a stakeholder in some projects because of a lack of international interest.

Meanwhile students are still protesting the so called “austerity” policies of the Couillard government; some university students are still asking for lower tuition, forgetting that Quebec universities have fees as little as one third of Ontario universities. For example, an engineering course in Montreal is $3750 a year, compared to more than $8,000 at Ryerson University in Toronto. It is $21,000 for an MBA at Queens University in Kingston compared to $7500 at HEC in Montreal.

Quebec is still facing protests and strikes by professors and students demanding the end of austerity and therefore the end of a balanced budget; it is now burdened with three investments in different mining projects in addition to the one billion dollars investment in the Bombardier C jetliner, it also has to build the roads and infrastructures which is necessary for potential investors in the Plan Nord.

Thanks to the Parti Quebecois and “les Carrés Rouge” (red squares) Quebec missed a tremendous opportunity in 2011-2012 to launch successfully the Plan Nord, this opportunity is not likely to come back in the near future.

The learning of democracy in French Canada started following the conquest of New France of 1759-1760 by the English.

The Plains of Abraham defeat of 1759 and the subsequent Montreal capitulation in the spring of 1760 forced the departure of a large number of French soldiers from New France henceforth called Canada; following this war called the Seven Years War, France and England signed a peace treaty in 1763 called the Treaty of Paris which among other clauses granted French Canadians the right to practice their religion and to continue a partial Seigniorial system. Later, by the Act of Quebec of 1774, the oath of Loyalty to the King of England was maintained in order to participate in the colony’s government but without the necessity of renouncing the catholic faith. Governor Murray was worried about the attraction of the American Revolution over the 85,000 inhabitants of the new Canadian colony so the new Act reaffirmed the right of citizens to practice Catholicism while allowing the use of the French legal code in civil cases. Finally for good measure the French Seigneurial system was reinstated mainly to allow better land management.

The English Governor who had replaced the French Intendant named by Louis XV came from a country with vastly different political traditions and precedents that had prevailed in France.

In England, the Magna Carta of 1215, also called the Great Charter of the Liberties of England, allowed the limitation of the Monarchy’s power to the benefit of feudal Barons; gradually this Charter brought the English King himself under the Rule of Law and according to Lord Jenning " it became the greatest constitutional document of all times- the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot".

This document was followed by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 preventing arbitrary arrests in great contrast to the "lettres de cachet" issued by the French kings which allowed the imprisonment of often innocent citizens for indefinite periods in dungeons such as the Bastille in Paris.

France went through a very different route: reaching a peak of absolutism with Louis X1V proclaiming to his court in Versailles that "L’État c’est moi"

Until the French Revolution of 1789, it had been impossible to change the very French concept of absolute monarchy so that under both Louis XV and Louis XV1 any suggestions of change toward a constitutional monarchy as in England, was severely suppressed. The French Revolution of 1789 eliminated Monarchy but replaced it unfortunately in 1805 by the Imperial dictature of Napoleon.

Meanwhile in England democracy was fast progressing: in 1705 an election was held where voters, mainly land owners, were able to elect sitting members of Parliament (M.P.) in the House of Commons.

The English concept of elected representatives crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Canada; following the Constitutional Act of 1791 the English Parliament created two distinct provinces, Upper Canada with a majority Anglophone and Lower Canada mostly French Canadians. A house of Parliament was needed: in December 1792 under the authority of the English governor two parliamentary Assemblies were created one in Lower Canada (Quebec) located in Montreal and the other in Upper Canada (Ontario). Following the election of 1792, fifty members of Parliament from each province were elected.

A controversy soon erupted when the assembly of Lower Canada named Jean Antoine Panet as president of the Assembly which annoyed the Anglo Quebecers used to dominating politics in the language of Shakespeare. Following discussions with London, the new laws voted by the new Parliament were allowed to be drafted in French as long as there was a legal English version. It was a first in the British Empire which Quebec was a part of: indeed no other country as part of the British Empire could write its laws in a language other than English.

Soon French Canadians became brilliant parliamentarians and gradually, democratic customs took root in the population of Quebec just as it did in the U.S. recently freed from England’s domination.

Together with absolutism from the French Regime came authoritarism from the Catholic clergy which was no less noxious. We have to remember that starting with Samuel de Champlain our first New France governor, that no Protestants were allowed in the Colony; this banishment had been implemented after the proclamation of 1627 by Louis X111. Later, on religious and civil authorities kept new ideas from French Encyclopedists away from the general population so that the citizens of New France could not be aware of what was written by French authors such as Voltaire and Diderot; they were considered sacrilegious by the Quebec religious authorities. So what a shock to the clergy to realize that the publication of the first newspaper in 1778, La Gazette Littéraire de Montréal, would allow the spreading of all these new concepts of freedom of thoughts and civil liberty. What was even more worrisome for the clergy, was that the Gazette was quoting extensively the "sulphurous" writings of Voltaire.

Soon an alliance between seigneurs and clergy would coalesce into a powerful lobby consisting of Monsieur Étienne de Montgolfier the Collège de Montréal’s* superior and Monsieur Hertel Sieur de Rouville, a local judge. Their persistent writings asking for the closing of the newspaper finally convinced Governor Haldimand in 1779 to jail the printer Fleury Mesplet for three years and for the Editor Valentin Jautard considered more culpable, three and a half years. Locked in an unheated jail cell called the Provost jail, in the Quebec

*Still a school located at the same address as 240 years ago on Sherbrooke Street.

City Citadel, Jautard was given an especially harsh treatment; mostly bread and water served by the jail keeper himself a Franciscan named Father Berey who knew how to treat his "dangerous" prisoner in the "right" manner. Jautard came out of jail a shadow of himself a broken a man who died less than five years later at the age of 49.* As to Mesplet, once out of jail he continued running his printing operation which had been managed by his wife during his imprisonment.

He then decided in 1785, 3 years after exiting jail, to continue the publication of his newspaper which will become bilingual, and be named "La Gazette de Montréal", "The Montreal Gazette", which would shield it from its enemies (i.e. the English governor and the clergy) because it was read extensively by the Anglo elite.

The newspaper was published until Mesplet's death in 1794 when it was bought out of bankruptcy by anglo investors and is still being published to this day under the name of "The Gazette".

MOTHER ST.GABRIEL

Another story even more dramatic took place during the conquest of New France after the battle of the Plain of Abraham of September 1759. This incredible story involving a young nun and a young Scottish soldier was recently published in a book entitled "A Bard of Wolfe’s Army" published under the sponsorship of the Stewart Foundation of Montreal.

In this book, A Scottish Sergeant in the English Army named James Thomson (1733-1830) dictated his memoirs which were edited and noted by two historians, Earl John Thompson and Ian Macpherson McCulloh. Sergeant Thomson educated in Scotland reveals through 30 anecdotes different events one of which describes the Victory of General Wolfe of September 1759 over General Montcalm; after the battle, hundreds of wounded French and English soldiers were taken to the care of the Augustine Nuns at the Quebec General Hospital.

*L’époque de Voltaire au Canada par Jean Paul De Lagrave.

A badly wounded soldier, Sergeant John Wilson age 23, of the Fraser’s Highlanders, was put in a hospital bed under the attentive care of a comely 19 years old nun by the name of Soeur St. Gabriel. The young nun was completely devoted to her patient and it was no small part due to her care that the sergeant recovered almost completely from his wounds.

On the April 28 1760, alarms were sounded; there was a counter attack at Sillery by the French forces led by the Chevalier de Lévis. Despite his state of weakness, Sergeant Wilson decided to volunteer to fight with his regiment; after a medical examination he was declared fit for battle.

His departure brought a distraught Soeur St. Gabriel to tears and I quote: "she was taken with violent fits which was observed by the other nuns of the convent" which did not yet attract suspicions. Unfortunately the Battle of Sillery won by the French caused many deaths one of which was of young Sergeant Wilson.

As Sergeant Thomson tells in his own words: "The news soon found its way to the Convent; and there was the devil to pay! St. Gabriel was again taken with fits and convulsions and it became necessary to attend to her in particular. She was undressed and put to bed when what in the name of wonder did not the nuns discover? Why that the Highland Sergeant, whose death had just been reported was the only cause of her illness. They proceeded to look closer into the possible cause and lo-and-behold, they discovered that she had her weame * up."

*womb

"The Mother Abbess was now sent who began by accusing poor St.Gabriel of vile conduct and threatened to have her put to the torture if she did not acknowledge her guilt, but devil-a-word did the abbess get out of her but merely sobs and sighs. At length the Abbess calls a council of Nuns and they had the poor Gabriel brought before them, but all they could get from her was: Ah! Nous sommes toutes mortelles."

"There was a paper drawn up condemning poor Gabriel to be smothered and to which was obtained the signature of the Bishop. It was sent by a priest in due form for the confirmation of General Murray, it having been the rule for the Intendants to ratify these judgments during the French time – however, in General Murray they held the wrong sow by the ear for instead of putting his name to it, he sent the nuns a written message, acquainting them they had no right to sit in judgment upon the life of any of the subjects of His Majesty and declared that if the nun was accused of any crime against the laws, she must be brought to trial by a lawfully constituted court and not one of their own forming. That is they did not desist he would order two field pieces of artillery to be planted opposite the door of their convent, and batter down the walls about their ears and report home to England the shameful transgression that they had committed against the existing laws."

The sentence by the Council of Nuns was postponed indefinitely even if according to the rules of the Order contacts with a person of the opposite sex were forbidden unless for charitable purposes: in case of transgression according to Sergeant Thomson the nuns had to either smother the culprit between two feather mattresses or imprison her with only bread and water as sustenance.*

Many years later, Sergeant Thomson as civil engineer, had the responsibility of inspecting all public buildings in Quebec: in his work he had to meet Soeur St. Gabriel who was alive and well and who had been given the task of making needed small repairs too the convent.

Through the years they became friends and Sergeant Thomson was eventually able to hear from Soeur St.Gabriel that the child born from her love affair with Sergeant Wilson was alive and had been confided to the grand-mother who lived nearby.

Nearly 20 years after the birth of her child Soeur St. Gabriel managed to get a letter from her son thanks to Sergeant Thomson; he was able to deliver the precious letter sewn in his pocket by the grand-mother to Soeur St. Gabriel. The poor nun died at fourty six years old never having seen her son. **

*Note from the author: The smothering sentence solved two problems: getting rid of the culprit and the fruit of her crime.

**The Hôtel-Dieu archivist has confirmed to the Editor John Earl Chapman, that Soeur St. Gabriel did indeed exist and she died in June 1787 aged 46. This confirmation was obtained against the promises of not revealing Soeur St. Gabriel’s family name. For the time being it has not been possible to obtain the transcript of the Council of Nuns, condemning Soeur St. Gabriel to be smothered.

CONCLUSION

The history of Mesplet and Jautard circa 1780 shows the Clergy and Seigneurs influence on the British administration while Sergeant Thomson anecdotes of 1760, demonstrate the beneficial influence of an English governor.

The evolution of French Canada toward a democratic system was accelerated by the existence of an English Parliament which had its first election in 1705. The British regime allowed French Canada to make a gradual transition from religious authoritarism and royal absolutism to a democratic system over a period of a hundred years marked by the bloody repression of 1837-38 and by the Act of Union of 1840 disastrous for Quebec but tempered by the alliance of Lafontaine-Baldwin of 1841-1850.

The Confederate Act of 1867 and the Westminster Statute of 1931 finally created a Canada independent of Britain, a new country which included a Quebec willing to participate in the great Canadian adventure.

In 1948 there was an expulsion of Palestinians residents from the area that is now Israel (see map). In 1967 during the six-day War, more Palestinians had to flee and the whole of the West Bank was occupied and controlled by Israeli soldiers. In June 1997, the Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu presented its “Allon Plus Plan”. This plan outlines the retention of some 60% of the West Bank including the “Greater Jerusalem”, the entire Jordan Valley and a network of Israeli only bypass-roads.

Since September 29th 2000, 9,128 Palestinians have been killed while 1,195 Israeli were killed in different incidents on the West Bank; 6,200 Palestinians are now imprisoned in Israeli jails. There are currently 262 Jewish-only settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land on the West Bank.

On January 2015, the Israeli’s Interior Ministry gave figures of 389,250 Israelis living in the West Bank and a further 375,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem: this compared to about 120,000 settlers in 2006 in the two areas.

In 2002, Israel’s official policy was that no new settlements were to be built, but at least one hundred unauthorized outposts were established with state funding since 2002.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Time of February 29th 2015 said: “Israeli settlements in the West Bank dishonor the nation’s democracy.” To illustrate, he interviewed Mahmood Ahmed, a Palestinian farmer near Sinjil on the West Bank. “We planted 5,000 trees last year, settlers cut them all down with shears or uprooted them.”

In a conversation with 69-year-old Abed-al-Majeed who has sent all of his 12 children to university, he told the journalist that he used to have 300 sheep grazing on family land in Ousra but that nearby settlers often attack him when he is on his own land; now he is down to 100 sheep. “I can’t graze my sheep on my own land”, he said, “if I go there settlers will beat me.”

Nearly 70 years ago an Israeli intelligence officer witnessed a Palestinian village being demolished to make way for the new Jewish state.

Yaznar Smilansky was so moved by what he saw that he wrote a book in Hebrew in 1949 called “Khirbet Khizeh”: in it he described the forced expulsion of civilians mostly old men, women and children, the young men having already fled. “They were put in trucks and carried away”.

The Palestinians refer to that period of 1948 as “al-Nakba” i.e. the great catastrophe. Some 70,000 Palestinians were deported or forced to flee from their homes into refugee camps. No compensation by Israel was ever offered to the dispossessed and of course their right of return was denied.

APPENDIX B

Palestinian refugees and locations from the time of their expulsion in 1948 as well as from the War of 1967 [1]

Country or regionCampsRefugees % of total Total

populationpopulation

Jordan 10 2,034,641 31% 6,500,000

Lebanon 12 455,00010% 4,500,000

Syria 9 526,7442.8% 23,000,000

Gaza Strip 8 1,260,00071.5% 1,760,000

West Bank 19 750,000 31.2% 2,400,000

58 5,026,385 11.3% 38,160,000

The adjacent countries to Israel became the obvious outlet for refugees from the expulsion of 1948 to the War of 1967(The Six Day War). These refugees have been helped by the host countries, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria but mainly by an agency of the United Nation called UNRWA short for “United Nation Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.” The large proportion of refugees in Jordan created instability in that country which was overcome eventually by King Hussein’s policies of integration. Lebanon was also in turmoil in two civil wars brought about in part by the new minority status of Christians caused by the influx of refugees with the Islamic faith and by the interference of the Syrian government.

THE MARCH 3RD 2015 SPEECH OF NETANYAHU AT THE U.S. CONGRES

At the endof his speech mainly addressed to those in the U.S. government “naïve” enough to negotiate with Iran to restrain its attempts at nuclear capabilities and I quote: “A normal country should behave like a normal country: Israel is a normal country but Iran is not.”

The hypocrisy of the prime minister of Israel is staggering. According to the

London-based JANE’s it is estimated “that the Israeli arsenal may contain as many as 400 nuclear weapons with a total combined yield of 50 megatons”. JANE’s

Intelligence Review reported on September 1st 1998 that satellite reconnaissance

Martin Sieff of the Washington Time reported on July 1st 1998 that Israel is buying three large submarines (Dolphin Class) from Germany capable of carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles. On June 3rd, 2012 Der Spiegel reported that three German submarines sold to Israel are capable of staying submerged for 18 days and are now equipped with nuclear missiles: Germany has long known about this (it has financed the sale of these submarines to Israel) but has chosen not to publicize the fact.

The submarines according to Der Spiegel are equipped with Israeli-designed

Popeye missiles with a 1,500 miles range and the nuclear warheads are produced at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.

As we listened to Netanyahu speech at the U.S. Congress, it is believed that at least two nuclear missiles carrying submarines were patrolling 24 hours a day underwater far from Israel, in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea facing Iran waiting for a signal to strike[2]. “The Germans can be proud to have secured the existence of Israel for many years.” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Der Spiegel on June 2012. These submarines will be used as “second strike” to wipe out enemies who would have attacked Israel first with nuclear weapons. (See photograph) “Given Israel’s small size, a nuclear deterrent promises massive retaliation if Israel’s homeland is threatened”[3].

So far Israel has refused to admit to its nuclear capabilities. They have also refused to sign together with Pakistan, India and Sudan the United Nation-sponsored resolution of non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapon of 1970 whose aim is to reduce the possibility of a nuclear war and the ultimate elimination of nuclear arsenals.

Is Israel a normal country as opposed to Iran especially in the face of their illegal occupation of the West Bank? Despite a vote by the U.N. Security Council through resolution 242 on “the withdrawal of Israel armed forces from the territories occupied in the recent 1967 conflict”, Israel today occupies militarily all of the West Bank, after 48 years, it is the longest occupation in modern history.

When a country, Islamic or otherwise is facing possible hostilities with Israel, it is also facing a pro-Israel Lobby so powerful that it can magically create an invitation to the prime minister of Israel in the U.S. Congress without going through normal diplomatic channels and without the consent of the U.S. President.

The situation is without precedent; no similar invitations have ever been offered to the presidents of Egypt or to past and present presidents of the Palestinian Authority. (See cartoon)

Recently in a pique over the Palestinian Authority decision to appeal to the International Court on possible war crimes in the recent Gaza war, Israel has withheld $100 million a month of custom fees that belong to the Palestinians.

Without this amount the Palestinian Authority administration will soon cease to exist but negotiations are being held at this time to solve the situation with Israel being prompted by the U.S. to stop withholding the money.

In 1978 at the Camp David conference, President Carter persuaded Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to sign the first peace treaty in the modern Middle East, which give back to Egypt the conquered territory of Sinai.

At that conference where there was nobody to represent the Palestinians, the restitution of land in the West Bank became a “side issue”; Begin had always refused to call the West Bank Palestine, instead referring to it as Judea and Samaria. Without committing himself to any specific action, Begin said he would provide the Palestinians some degree of peaceful political activity; this was the last day of the Camp David conference which had lasted 13 days and an exhausted Jimmy Carter resigned himself to accept the vague promise[4] in order to announce the peace deal in Washington the following day. The Palestinian cause was left in limbo where it remains to this day.

When the Israeli army invaded West Beirut in August 1982, two targets in particular seemed to interest General Ariel Sharon’s army, Thomas Friedman then a correspondent for the New York Times later wrote. One was an archive of Old Palestine-books, land deeds, photographs of Arab life and maps that marked every Arab village that stood before Israel was created. Friedman observed the graffiti the Israeli soldiers left behind in the room where the archives had been kept.

“Palestinians? What’s that? And Palestinians f___ you”. The other targets were the two Palestinian refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila. Sharon’s troops sealed off the camps and then let a local militia enter and take revenge for the death of their leader. Over the next three days, the terrorists killed more than 700 refugees in camps; men, women and children while the Israelis had a clear view of the slaughter from the rooftop of the Kuwaiti embassy that they occupied.

That same general became the next Prime Minister of Israel on March 7th 2001, and was in office for five years until a stroke incapacitated him.

Looking back at all those years since 1967 it is obvious that Israel had no intention of ceasing the occupation of the West Bank and stopping the building of new settlements; as a matter of fact there has been an acceleration of new buildings for settlers in the West Bank during the Netanyahu government.

On March 30th, 2015, I attended a conference at Concordia University in Montreal given by the editor and journalist Gideon Levy of Haaretz, the oldest Israeli newspaper founded in 1918.

Mr. Levy is pessimistic about the possible creation of a Palestinian state without the active support of the U.S. which is unlikely thanks to the Republican support for Israel conduct in the occupied territories. Mr. Levy is also worried about a new racist attitude by the Israeli, who consider non-Jews as somewhat inferior human beings and not to be trusted as neighbors.

He did recall an incident a few years ago where he had to go to Ramallah to speak to a Palestinian journalist; at the checkpoint he noticed an ambulance with its red lights flashing, immobilized before the guards’ gate: he went to inquire to the ambulance driver who told him that he had a sick elderly male patient in the back of his vehicle but that he was used to waiting to reach the hospital in Ramallah for at least an hour each time at that particular checkpoint. Mr. Levy went to the guardhouse where he was cleared to enter with his Israeli passport. He then saw that three soldiers were inside the guard house, two playing backgammon and one reading a magazine. Somewhat disturbed by their attitude toward the Palestinian ambulance, he asked them if they would delay an Israeli ambulance for an hour if it was their father inside. The soldiers were so startled by this incredible question that by instinct they raised their weapons at Gideon Levy as if he was a threat to their safety!

Another anecdote relates to an interview done in 1994 with the Chief of the General Staff Ehud Barak, who later became prime minister. Asked by Mr. Levy what he would do as an 18 year old Palestinian in the face of the occupation by the Israeli army: “I would become a terrorist” said Barak spontaneously. The declaration reported in the press created a political storm in Israel: later General Barak denied that he had said that to Mr. Levy.

For the Palestinians, those who resist the occupation by Israel are freedom fighters: Israeli should remember that they too had their own freedom fighters in the summer of 1944 in Warsaw.

According to Levy’s explanations of Israeli thinking, the Palestinians being mostly Muslims cannot be trusted: they are also poor and sometimes illiterate so they do not qualify as human beings on the same level as Israeli Jews. So Mr. Levy is worried that a system of apartheid is slowly but surely being created inside Israel proper and also on the West Bank where the dream of a Palestinian State still exists.

THE BRIDGE GAME THAT SAVED A FAMILY FROM AUSCHWITZ

In 1942, Romania - which had been so far a faithful ally of Germany - had to start considering what to do with its Jewish population mainly located around Bucharest. Their previous political stance was “we will handle our own Jews”, but the pressure on Romania by the Nazis to eliminate all Jews from Eastern Europe was growing.

At that time my wife’s father-in-law was a prosperous merchant living in a big house in Bucharest that had to be shared with three other families because the Romanian authorities had deemed their home too big for a single family.

So Elias Goldstein and his wife Esther were living in a wing of the big house, their son Mordecai (my wife’s future husband) and their sister Rebecca having already left the country.

Every Wednesday a bridge game took place at the house with other ladies, one of them the mother of an Iron Guard officer, the equivalent of the German SS.

One day at a Wednesday bridge game, the kind neighbor warned Mrs. Goldstein that a raid against them was planned for the following day. Immediately the Goldstein couple gathered a few belongings and was able to flee by car to a port on the Black Sea. With a few well-placed bribes the couple managed to get on a passenger ship at Constanta steaming for Istanbul and from there they were able to reach Israel where relatives were waiting for them.

So the Goldstein family escaped unharmed from the horrors of the Holocaust, a rare event in the history of Eastern European Jews.

According to the Wiesel Commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, Romania murdered in various ways between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews in Romania and in the war zone of Bessarabia and of Bukovina.

The Jews have often been the victims of persecution, pogroms and more recently the annihilation of six million Jews in Eastern Europe.

The creation of Israel was their hope of a permanent homeland but its border of 1948 did not include the West Bank. The war of 1967, when the Israeli Air Force made a sudden attack on Egypt destroying 450 of their planes on the ground and rendering Nasser helpless, was a great victory for Israel. Unfortunately their desire for an enlarged state violated the legal and international rules obligating Israel to return to their original border of 1948 as established by the United Nations.

Israel - of all nations - should be particularly sensitive in avoiding the creation of ghettos (Gaza and the many Palestinians refugee camps) as in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and of treating the Palestinians and Arab Israeli as second class citizens.

The Biblical evocation of” the chosen people” taken to the letter makes the Israelis feel superior to the Palestinians while creating a ‘de facto apartheid state.’ Because of past Jewish suffering, Israel ought to be more sensitive towards its Arab neighbors who are poorer, less educated and of a different religion.

Israel’s prosperity has also been helped by donations to their excellent health and educational institutions by wealthy American Jews who took advantage of the U.S.-Israel Income Tax Treaty (article 15-A).

THE SAGA OF DR. NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN

The terrible event where close to six million Jews, gypsies and other minorities were slaughtered by Nazi Germany has defined the public opinion war especially in the U.S. and used to justify the illegal occupation of the West Bank (Palestine).

A book by Dr. Norman Finkelstein entitled “The Holocaust Industry” (first published in 2000 with a second edition in 2003) examined the relentless public relations campaign to keep the Holocaust event alive and omnipresent in U.S. media.

The book described in tedious and well- documented details the diplomatic and financial maneuvers that forced the Swiss Banks to pay to Jewish organizations the enormous sum of $1.2 billion in 1999 for dormant accounts owned by Jews despite the facts than an accounting done by the Volker commission found that the current value of accounts for which some information was available run from a probable $170- to a maximum of $260 million (page 13 and 14). This was much higher than the $32 million originally estimated by the Swiss Banks that were forced to pay to avoid a political backlash and the threat of not being permitted to operate in the State of New York.

In Finkelstein’s book we find that the Swiss banks and the German government had to pay sizeable amount to survivors of slave labor while the U.S. government paid out the pittance of $500,000 to Jewish owners of dormant American bank accounts.

The book is a recitation of the “Shakedown” tactics utilized to extract vast sums of money mainly from Switzerland and Germany.

The facts in Finkelstein’s book are well documented and all the sources are rigorously cited, somewhat like a Ph.D. thesis. The outcry against the book published in 2000 described as a “Reflection on the Exploitation of Jewish suffering” was immediate: the writer whose own mother was a Holocaust survivor, became an outcast among American Jews and vilified as a self-hating Jew. Meanwhile Mr. Finkelstein with a Ph.D. In Political Science from Princeton University became assistant professor in 2000 at De Paul University in Illinois where he had obtained his tenure. A sometimes violent campaign led by Alan Dershowitz (of O.J. Simpson fame) against his stand on the Holocaust and the Palestinian conflict led to the denial of his tenure at De Paul in 2007-2008.

He was placed on administrative leave: finally on September 5th 2007 Professor Finkelstein announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on confidential terms. An official statement from De Paul stated that outside influences played no role in the decision.

A year later Professor Finkelstein was officially banned from entering Israel. On May 23rd 2008 upon entering Israel at Ben-Gurion International Airport, he was detained for 24 hours and then sent back to the U.S.

One has to admire Alan Dershowitz for his relentless attacks on Finkelstein, which resulted in the first-ever firing of a professor from an academic institution because of his opinion. Here is how Professor Matthew Abraham described the firing of Dr. Finkelstein: “the case demonstrates the substantial pressure outside parties can place on a mid-tier religious institution when the perspectives advanced by a controversial scholar threaten dominant interests.”

THE NETANYAHU CONFERENCE IN MONTREAL

Closer to home, as the head of a Foundation granting scholarships to graduate students in the Montreal area, I had an interview with the new president of Concordia University in the fall of 2003.

She admitted that the University’s financial situation was difficult in particular because of what happened on September 9th 2002 when Mr. Netanyahu was scheduled to give a speech at Concordia University. A riot broke out between pro-Palestinian protestors and the event ticket holders. The lecture was cancelled and Netanyahu stayed at his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal; later on he accused the activists of supporting terrorism and “mad zealotry.”

The head of Concordia admitted to me that since 2003, all the traditional Jewish donors had stopped giving to Concordia University after the anti-Netanyahu riot: she was hoping that with the passage of time that donations would return.

“L’AFFAIRE MICHAUD” DECEMBER 2000 IN THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC

In a telephone interview with CKAC radio, Mr. Yves Michaud, an aspiring M.P. for the Parti Québécois related a conversation with a Jewish senator, Leo Kolber, where he (Michaud) had said in relation to suffering of the Jews: “The Armenians did not suffer, the Palestinians did not suffer, and the Rwandans did not suffer. It is always (just) you. You are the only people who suffered in the history of humanity.”[6] He said sarcastically. On December 12th 2000 the director of B’nai B’rith’s Quebec Chapter, Robert Libman sent a memo to then Premier Lucien Bouchard requesting that he stops Yves Michaud from being the PQ’s candidate in the Mercier riding.

Soon after, Lucien Bouchard condemned the remarks of the telephone interview as well as Michaud’s speech to the Quebec Estate General on the situation of the French Language. In a humorous fashion, Michaud had suggested to rename the subway station Lionel Giroux as the “Mordecai Richler” station and for the René Lévesque Boulevard to be renamed the “Ariel Sharon” Boulevard.

Lucien Bouchard the premier, incensed by Michaud’s speech condemned the remarks in the name of his party and the government of Quebec. The motion was unanimously adopted by the Quebec National Assembly. It was the first time in the history of Quebec that a citizen speech and remarks were so condemned.

THE UNITED NATIONS’ IMPOTENCE

On December 11th 1948 the U.N. General Assembly voted a non-binding resolve: “that refugees wishing to return to their home and live at peace with their neighbor should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This non-binding United Nations’ General Assembly article 11 of Resolution 194 has been annually re-affirmed but Israel has refused the application of that resolution.

Israel has also steadfastly refused to compensate Palestinians who have lost their homes and possessions in the expulsion of 1948 soon after the creation of Israel and from the Six-day war in 1967. Also, Israel has so far refused to abide by United Nation resolution #3236 of November 22nd 1974, which recognizes the rights of the Palestinian people including the right of self-determination and the right of return. The U.S. veto has repeatedly prevented this resolution from being binding on Israel.

It is in Israel’s long-term interest to bring peace to Palestine and abide by international rules. The West does not want anti-Israel sentiments to degenerate into anti-Semitism especially among the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world.

A JEWISH SUCCESS STORY

The Jewish communities in the West have fared exceptionally well since the end of World War II. In the U.S., anti-Semitic barriers have fallen while Jews rose to preeminence. According to Lipset and Raab[7] in 1997, per capita Jewish income was almost double that of the non-Jews; 40% of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics were Jewish, as were 20% of professors at major universities; and 40% of partners in the leading laws firms in New York and Washington. I take my hat off to these spectacular achievements.

The prosperous Jews of America and Israel should cultivate compassion when dealing with their less educated and poorer neighbors. The wealth of the Jews should not be used to oppress but to nurture. Let us hope that American Jews lean on Israel and on the U.S. government to abide by human rights and international law regarding the Palestinians and the occupied territories.

The alternative is an apartheid system as the Islamic population in Israel and Palestine is out growing the Jewish-Israeli population. As an example in 1995, the percentage of Jews in Israel and Palestine was 56.7%; in 2005 it was 50.7%[8]. As a humanitarian alternative to an apartheid state which no Israeli wants, there is only one solution left: a two state solution and a negotiated agreement for land and refugees and a stop to the building of Jewish settlements in Palestine (the West Bank) which exacerbate an already tense situation.

CONCLUSION

Israel was the homeland of the Jews for close to 3000 years until the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, by the Romans.

Since then, through bouts of anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, culminating in the Nazi extermination camps of World War II, the Jews have wandered around the world in search of peace and security.

Israel is now their home as it was 2000 years ago and most Jews consider it their spiritual haven as well as their home country where they can immigrate at will.

The economic and scientific achievements of Israel are in contrast to the poverty in the occupied territories of the West Bank. This negates somewhat the glowing achievements of Israel whose long term future will brighten up once peace is achieved with the Palestinians and the occupation of the territories ends.

APPENDIX A

This article was written in April 2006: since then not much has changed in Palestine save for a tripling of the settlers’ population in the West Bank.

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE – AN ANALYSIS AND A SOLUTION

The West Bank was probably part of Israel when Titus in 70 A.D destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and expelled most of the Jews who resettled eventually across the Roman Empire, thus the justification for a greater Israel and the return of all Jews to the Holy Land.

From the Palestinian perspective, Israel was created by the U.N. in 1947, over the opposition of Arab countries, in order to alleviate the bad conscience of Europe whose action or inaction created the Holocaust: Israel became a refuge for persecuted Jews but in the process expelled or made some of the local Palestinian population to flee. After 1948, refugee camps were set up which over the years bred more resentment and anger.

No attempt was made by Israel to compensate the refugees for the loss of their homes and lands or obviously to accept their return on their land already given to Israeli Jews. When Israel occupied Beirut in 1983 the first thing they did was to burn the building that contained the title deeds of properties stored inside by Palestinians relating to their former properties in Israel.

Then, in 1967 taking advantage of the war waged against Israel by its neighbors, Israel took control of the West Bank, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights and started to offer low interest rates loans to settlers to purchase housing set up by the government in new settlements in the West Bank.

To this day Israel is still the occupier with the implied “blessing” of the U.S. despite at least two resolutions by the U.N. to abide by the U.S. Charter and leave the occupied land. The opposing voices of these U.N. resolutions were the U.S. and Guam and of course Israel. That is why the U.S. is seen as an extension of the Israel government (or vice versa) by most Islamic countries.

Or course the three great monotheist religions are using their religious books to justify their positions: the Old Testament to justify the greater Israel and for the Christian right the existence of Israel will accomplish the Apocalypse prophecies while the Koran proclaims Jerusalem as its most holy site after Mecca and Medina.

Unfortunately, the Islamic world seems to be governed by religious edicts from the Middle Ages (in the recent cartoon incidents the few reasonable voices from the Muslims world have been either silenced or jailed) but the perceived absence of justice in the Palestine situation has exacerbated their loss of faith in the fairness of the West and in the U.S. with its ever approving stance toward Israel.

When the most powerful secular nation on earth supports the untenable position of Israel regarding the occupied territories, resentment, then anger and finally despair make the Islamic World abandons reason to take refuge in a faith that often breeds violence and revenge.

Close to 60 years have elapsed since the creation of Israel and hardly any progress has been made to correct glaring injustices: the 1948 refugees have not yet been compensated, the West Bank is still occupied with a now permanent wall encroaching on Palestinian territories, the main Jewish colonies are still being expanded: Jerusalem including East Jerusalem is in total control of Israel, the newly freed Gaza strip is a virtual jail cut off from both Israel and the West Bank and now Israel and the U.S. are stopping revenues to the Palestinian Authority to punish its population for having elected Hamas.

Other events have offended the Muslim communities but the festering conflict in Palestine is a catalyst for the mounting religious fanaticism breeding more violence against the main supporter of Israel, the U.S. and its main allies. One billion angry Muslims constitute a limitless reservoir of potential suicide bombers able to attack western lives and property for a long time unless a peaceful solution in Palestine is found.

Extremism and unreason will continue to take precedence over rationality in the Muslim world because of the unsolved Palestinian situation: the refusal of Israel to yield and the corresponding support of the U.S. is putting the whole World in grave danger.

With the strongest army in the Middle East and with nuclear capabilities, Israel could certainly assure their own security while a small Palestine State would exist next door, following a final and just treaty brokered by the U.S. and the U.N.

AFTERWORD

Since April 2006, the situation has hardly changed save for another peace talk sponsored by the U.S. During that time, the population of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories has gone from 250,000 to 420,000 – a fact which makes negotiations more delicate for Israel. Some Israeli settlers have found a new way to hurt the Palestinians: one of the most valuable assets of Palestinians farmers is their olive trees which take as much as 100 years to reach full maturity. Recent news taken from Time Magazine (European edition of November 15, 2010). “A group of extremist Jewish settlers from Yitzhak torched at least 200 olive trees that belong to residents of a village near Nabs in the West Bank and also torched a number of nearby farms.”